I keep hearing about how Linux Mint runs fine on low resource hardware. I think that's nice. But I have Mint 14 KDE 64-bit running on some great hardware and it cranks! I bought one of these HP XW8600 Workstations as a refurbished system on eBay. If you're interested, there are plenty more of them from a few different companies being sold on eBay right now. What a deal I got on this baby! Now I have Mint running on 8 cores at 3Ghz with 32Gb of DDR2 DRAM!!!! I have never had a system that runs so smoothly before. KDE 4.10 is just awesome on this hardware. I am using kernel 3.7, but I think I'm going to update to 3.8 soon. Anybody else have any experience with kernel 3.8? I only still run Windows because there are still some apps I have to run for work. It actually runs pretty good in VirtualBox. I have Windows XP Pro installed in one virtual machine. I have Windows 7 32-bit installed in another virtual machine.

I enabled the OpenGL 3D extentions in KDE 64-bit. I have the cube spinning to switch desktops along with a bunch of other eye candy working great. This is my default favored operating system.

Memory has gotten cheap too! I bought the machine with 4GB being composed of 4 each 1GB modules. I pulled them out and installed 8 each 4G modules myself! I also added the 2 TB drive and the Blue Ray drive. What modern hardware are you running?

I just added the "edgers" PPA to all the systems I administer. This hasn't borked one with modern hardware. I did bork one with an old Nvidia chip, but I went into a terminal session and returned the driver to 304.64. The kernel has been fine.

Indeed. I learned the words clonezlla and parted magic very early on. However I was up gone past midnight last night installing Mint 14 KDE and cnfiguring it. I just did a dist upgrade without a backup. No big deal if it borks because it's a learning exercise for me.

Well, this time it went better, marginally. The kernel installed fine and worked a treat, except it busted the AMD proprietary drivers so I purged the new kernel. Back to normal now. It looked like dkms choked on 3.7.

It's a shame really because that kernel was noticably quicker. Thanks anyway.

TehGhodTrole wrote:The kernel installed fine and worked a treat, except it busted the AMD proprietary drivers so I purged the new kernel.

This is exactly why I avoid AMD video cards. They work okay in Windows, but often choke on Linux. That's why I advise all who will listen to go with Nvidia if you are going to go Linux 3D acceleration. The Intel drivers are stable too, but slow. Besides, Nvidia graphics cards aren't very expensive at all. Especially if you value your time. There are a bunch of them on eBay in the $30 range.

Nice setup you got, Rudemeister. I wonder if you could run a Xen hypervisor and your Win 7 as a VM with VGA passthrough?

By coincidence I just saw one of your older posts asking about OpenBox (you mean VirtualBox?), KVM and Xen.

Well, I was in the same boat a year ago and decided to go with Xen since I needed full hardware acceleration for my graphics card under a Windows 7 VM. Xen was the first to offer this, and still seems to be years ahead.

What this Xen setup does for me is that I got rid of dual-boot. Windows runs in a VM but anyone using it would be hard pressed to find any (performance) difference to a native installation.

Your PC should be a good candidate for that. Except perhaps the Nvidia graphics card - AMD has better support for both Xen hypervisor and for VGA passthrough to Windows. You will probably need a second graphics card for it anyway.

powerhouse wrote:Nice setup you got, Rudemeister. I wonder if you could run a Xen hypervisor and your Win 7 as a VM with VGA passthrough?

Well, Powerhouse, I know that 3D acceleration in the VM's I have now doesn't exist. I've only been using Virtualbox. So you're saying that 3D acceleration works in Xen, but not well with Nvidia? Hmmm. Well, I'm already commited to Nvidia at home and all the computers I supervise at the office. I do have one 3Ghz P4 with an AMD graphics chip. I might just fiddle with that setup first. I don't want to bork my production machines by experimenting on them. I think I'll give this a whack and see what happens on the P4.

@Rudemeister: It's not a good idea to use a production machine for that, at least not unless you have an easy and fast way to get it back working.

The hardware requirements are very strict with Xen and PCI / VGA passthrough to work properly. On the processor side it must support VT-d for Intel CPUs (and this must be enabled in the motherboard BIOS).

Some Nvidia graphics cards are supported, or can be made working with newer Xen hypervisors (4.2) or patches. Some Nvidia cards such as the Quadro series starting with the Quadro 2000 should work out of the box as secondary GPU. It's best to have two VGA adapters, one for Linux, the other for the Windows VM.

If you don't need native graphics acceleration under Windows - i.e. if you don't have any need for dual-boot - you probably won't need VGA passthru.

Hi, Rudemeister. Have you run any benchmarks on that rig? I installed Phoronix Test Suite but I have only run 1 test. Xonotic 0.6. I think it is #145 on the list. It was a 960 MB download for just that 1 test. I'll gladly post my last result if anyone is interested. Just need to crop the screenshot first, got my whole desktop and not just the window.

I'm dual booting with Windows 7 Pro 64-bit and Mint 14 KDE 64-bit. When I first got it it had 4GB install in 4 each 1GB DIMM's. But I pulled those out and plugged in 8 each of some 4GB DIMM's. I tweaked some other stuff since I have put it all together too. I haven't done a Linux benchmark on yet yet. I think I will a little later. I had to Install Windows first to get GRUB booting both OS's properly. So I ran the default gaming benchmark that came with Windows. I'm sure imy score would imporve if I ran it again, but I don't really care too much about that for the time being. Here a screen cap of my Linux Desktop and the Windows Benchmark.

@Powerhouse, my previous computer was a homebuilt P4 with 4GB of memory. It was maxed out and worked fine for years. But it was time to retire it. I installed Win7 on the drive. Then I installed Mint. It divided the drive almost in evenly in 2 and setup grub for a dual boot. Setting up Windows with all the other stuff took an entire Saturday. Setting up Mint 14 KDE took an hour. Geez. Anyway, I've setup a VM for Windows7 32-bit and Windows XPP 32-bit. Win7 VM has 4GB and WinXP has 2GB. Both VM's run faster than the native Windows on the previous machine. I have no intention of running games in them either. I actuall use the Win7 VM because I haven't found another mail client that will connect to an Exchange server using RPC. The idiot that set it up didn't allow for POP or IMAP, so I'm stuck booting Windows just to run Outlook. I must say that Outlook 2010 is a great mail client too. As fashionable (often rightfully) as it is to disparage Microsoft, Outlook is very nicely done. I actually like Win7 too. Anyway, I rarely have had cause to boot into Windows. VirtualBox is working that good. I have been playing games too. But I installed Steam for Linux and games just rock on this machine. I think I might look into running Outlook in Wine and then there would be no use for it at all. Linux on decent hardware is just so awesome, I can say enough good things about it. It has been funcioning PERFECTLY with Mint 14 KDE 64-bit as a primary OS. Awesomeness!

Just want to correct my test result above. I don't know exactly how to get the test to begin at a particular graphics setting other than edit the test-definition.xml file in the xonotic folder, or bring up the settings menu as soon as posible after the test loads. It starts by default at ultimate. Takes 10 seconds to change, so if anything, any setting less than ultimate might be a touch low.

@Rudemeister: Saw your Windows Experience Index and thought I through in this Passmark:

Above Passmark is from a Windows 7 Pro 64 bit Virtual Machine running on a Xen hypervisor. The only weak point I can find is the 3D graphics index of the Nvidia Quadro 2000 card - for the same price I could have gotten an AMD HD7970 with much better 3D performance. I run the Quadro with VGA passthrough, so the graphics performance is like native.